Saturday, 16 October 2010

In which Sainsbury's prove me wrong

I really, really wasn't going to blog again. But today I went to Sainsburys and it didn't go well.

The shopping was OK, I guess, but when I got to check out, there was exactly one fucking till open. One.

The queue of people trying to get their shopping out of the way early reached right across the fucking shitty store. Frantic announcements for "till-trained staff" or "shift leaders" were met with ... well, nothing.

Of course, the little knob jockeys were dead keen for us all to use their cock-sucking, anally fistulated, rancid cunt pus-filled, camel felching self-checkouts. Which were, of course, entirely fucking unused, precisely because they are so cock-suckingly, anally fistulatedly, rancid cunt pus-filledly, camel felchingly cunting useless.

So the little cunt bag assured me that she'd be right there to help me if there were any problems. I stopped counting after the twentieth fucking pointless cunting whorebagging fuckspaz arsebiscuit required her to log in and fix the useless gobshite piece of shit.

But that really wasn't what fucked me off. What really, really fucked me off was the little jobsworth whore CUNT telling me that it was MY FUCKING FAULT FOR NOT USING THE CUNTING TILL CORRECTLY!!!!

FUCK YOU, YOU LITTLE BAG OF RANCID PENSIONER'S PISS!!

Sainsbury do not fucking pay me to do your fucking work for you. And Sainsbury (and Tesco), get to fuck with these shitty fucking self-checkouts. They fuck your customers off and pretty soon no fucker is going to want to subject himself to this shit. YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE CUSTOMERS!

And of course, the final fucking kick in the teeth is reclaiming the 2 hours' free parking from them. Which meant I had to go and stand in another queue while the dumbfuck cunt behind that till had a nice chat with one of her colleagues.

Sainsbury, it's increasingly clear to me that your shops are staffed ignorant, arrogant, cockbag jobsworths who are even worse than the simpletons in Tesco.

Tonight, I'm going to get smashed as fuck and eat loads of vegetable curry and tarka dal. Tomorrow, I'm going to drive to Sainsburys, shit into one of their fucking useless orange bags, set fire to it and lob it at the store window.

You're seriously telling me you too fucking brainless to use self-scan? With my eyes shut and my hands tied behind my back, my BELLEND knows how to operate those things. The only people who screw it up are clueless pensioners and piss heads.

I've always rather liked self checkout. In the bad old days you had to stew in the queue while some old bat scanned the shopping of the people in front of you at a snail's pace. And all you could do was tell yourself "Not only can I do my job better than you, but I could do YOUR job better than you, you rancid crone".

Now you can prove it.

[However, I'd better close my long SBRY position on Monday, I guess...]

Staffed tills are obsolete. They are shit jobs that only exist to justify the supermarkets to Ludites locals.

In fact the whole layout of supermarkets is just a pointless psycological trick to remind punters of the old grocery stores.

Argos have already done away with isle roaming, and it wont be long till their catalogues are replaced with digital screens and a website for home shoppers.

Eventually supermarkets will just go virtual and you will digitally roam the isles for non-shopping list items, either from your home PC or from pods located at the superwarehouses. Shopping list items will automatically be reordered at a specific regular intervals unless users instruct otherwise.

There is no other path the supermarkets can follow and the first to do it will make a lot of money. The problem is timing. Too soon and the simple folk won't be able to adapt. Too late and you'll miss the boat and your competitors will make all the big money.

If you have a small number of easy to scan items then they are perfect. The moment you have a problem or you have to start keying in codes or you do something slightly wrong (unexpected item anyone?) then they are a pain.

And self service checkouts are not for the benefit of the customer. They are for the benefit of the supermarket because they don't need to pay wages for all the cashiers needed. Supermarkets aren't charities and nor do they have the best needs of the customer at the fore front of their minds. They are there to take our money (just like all the other capitalist pig shopkeepers! ;-}).

Welcome back!Coincidentally, I'm off to the new huge Sainsbury's in Crayford later today! I think I'll have a goon the self-serve thing.

marksany said... One word: Ocado.

I used to work for them, so next time you get your shopping delivered spare a thought for the poor cunt who has to lug your shopping to the door. He's got another 20 of those on his van, boxes full of bottled water for posh twats who don't know what a tap is.

My mum works at Morrisons, where these self-service machines are now being introduced. She tells me the management don't know what to do with staff, because sacking anyone would look bad in the current climate.

The result is checkout staff being asked to - amongst other things - work at the restuarant pot-wash without training or health and safety checks, older women being made to work in the warehouse, and younger staff including some graduates being asked to stack shelves.

Self-service machines are only good for tinier shops - the old fashioned '10 items or less'. Anything else becomes a false economy.

I would assume supermarkets which want to give the impression of being 'friendly' would recognise this. Seems not.

Yaaayyy - great stuff. These self service things will put the till staff out of jobs. They should be protesting against them.

I have heard that some customers get fed up with waiting for the barcode to blip through so fucking steal the item that the computer says "Nooo" to, just so they can move on and try and pay for the next.

You should try shopping at Lidl, Iceland or Netto, you Sainsbury snob then you wouldn't get angry and you could learn a foreign language at the same time.

@ ashtrayhead I do spare a thought for all the poor cunts. In almost any service or product you buy some poor bastard is doing a shit job you would not be prepared to do. It'll be a while before the ocado driver is replaced by a self service machine.

I totally agree with you. I'm considering getting a shirt printed with "Don't even try and get me to use your self service tills". It'll save me the hassle of telling the soon to be redundant staff.

As to the other comments - yes I probably could manage perfectly well by myself, BUT WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I???. If you take this to its logical conclusion we will just be wandering about a giant warehouse, and (probably) unloading the fucking trucks as well.

Some of us are old enough to remember SERVICE, and that's what keeps customers coming back. As an example I wanted some more memory for my PC. I could have spent ages searching online and Ebay etc, but I used ORCA's memory scanner, then picked up the phone. I was answered in seconds (0800 number) by a real human being, gave him the details and the new part arrived the following morning. Would I use them again - of course I bloody would!

@ marksanySorry, I didn't mean for my post to come across as having a go at you! Although it was very hard work (for me!) it was quite rewarding getting to drive all over SE England! I still have them deliver to me every now and then,and the driver always gets a tip. Home delivery is a fast growing part of supermarket business with Ocado leading the way with their service, although Tesco are still way in front in size.

The Morrisons automated tills are the worst. I try real hard to avoid those. Today I had to use one however, and I see the default is "got your own bags". The jobsworth took great pleasure in telling me that I had to answer the little question of whether or not I wanted a bag. Its a fucking machine. I am not answerable to a fucking machine.

I won't use self-service, but that's just me. But the whole business model of a supermarket is based on reducing staff costs, compared to the old small shop. They reduce costs for the customer too, that's why I use em. You too.

Mr Tesco doesn't love me, I don't love him. But we do business together. Voluntarily. We both get what we want. I aint bitching.

Actually, my local Tesco seems to have a knack of finding staff who are good at pretending to be pleased to see me. That doesn't prove anything, I know.

But I'll never use the self-serv. I'm an engineer, I don't trust machines with money, if I can avoid it. Actually, I like cash machines though. I haven't been in a bank for years. I'd rather go in Tesco ten times than a bank once. Dunno why.

Anyway, Hi Obo. I don't like you much sometimes. You probably wouldn't like me much either. Respect, though.

OBO'S BACK!Cunt!Fuck Sainsbury's and Tescos.Last time I hit a DIY-till I ended up shoving a week's load of shopping for a family of five onto the floor and fucking off, swearing so violently that the security guard cowered!Now I go to REAL shops, the butcher, the baker (REAL bread!), the green-grocer, the hardware store, the delicatessen, the off-licence.Guess what? The people there try to HELP. They make suggestions, they say "Taste this", "Try a bit of that" and they get to sell more than I intended ever buying.Why?Because it's NICE to be treated properly, like a money-spending customer. NOT some fucking cipher which can be programmed to serve itself. FUCK the supermarkets. I've not been in one for a year and I'm NEVER going to go in one ever again.

I now do all of my staple food shopping along with any household stuff in Aldi. Fucking brilliant, dirt cheap and the tills are very quick. Also the (female) staff are very pretty and friendly - I am now firm friends with a couple of them.

On the point, the Australian version is much the same. If they were being used by the justice department instead of retailers they'd be banned for being cruel and unusual punishment. The principle is incredibly simple, and I'm all for it, but the execution has been botched. The bloody things seem unable to cope with the weight variations when you use your own shopping bags, and since the ecomob have successfully bullied everyone into not using supermarket carriers the bloody machine is in a constant state of electronic dementia. And it's not much better if you only popped in for a carton of milk because you have to put the damn thing down on the till just to persuade it that you are actually fucking buying something. And just like in Sainsbury's all this takes place under a thousand prints of Jamie bloody Oliver's flaccid mug here it's a thousand pictures of Curtis Stone's shit eating grin (and if you haven't got Curtis Stone in the UK yet my advice is this: don't let the cunt in). And if's not the one with him in it's the one that plays their own fucking advertising jingle as muzak. At an annoyingly loud volume.

So, like Nonny above, we do our shopping in Aldi and the markets. Cheaper, as good or better quality, and decent service, especially at the markets. The only thing the supermarkets have going for them is if you spend $30 you get petrol vouchers worth 4¢ off per litre. Is it worth the retail purgatory for a few dollars of a tank of petrol? Is it fuck!

I'm glad it isn't just me! At least at mine there isn't a parking fee. They introduced their self service tills three weeks ago and it's chaos all the time. You need authority for booze, for glue, for sharp things. What is the fucking point?

Oh, so you're back from the pub are you? You and your fancy women and even fancier cars. And what time do you call this?

You needn't think I'm waiting up for you all hours of the day and night. Your dinner is in the dog.

The next time you piss off for weeks on end, I'm changing the locks and putting "I will survive" on the doorbell.

P.S. Anybody who is holding SBRY should look very carefully at their site acquisition department as they have been comprehensively out-classed by Tesco's junkyard dog team. They are now down to scuffling for me-too sites and don't seem capable of looking at whether those sites have viable access. That is perhaps why nobody else is trying to build on them....

I´ve been driven fucking mad in germany for the last 16 years of that fucking shite !Ask a cunt in front(usualy women)if "do you mind if i go ahead i have only a slab of butter and pay cash"nasty bastards with a massive trolleyfull ?The old ladies looking for fucking change hold the full fucking queue to a stand still!THE CUSTOMER IS CUNT AND THE UNEDUCATED CASHIER IS DOING US A FAVOURBRICKBAT

Now the meat is all halal and plastic in supermarkets we go to a farm shop. Absolutely top class meat at sensible prices and of far higher quality than in the supermarket. Plus they act like nazis if you have a youngster with you and you have wine or beer in your trolley!

Self-scan checkouts tend to be fine unless you buy alcohol - in which case you need a late-teen supervisor giving you their password all the time. Given this, I can only assume you were mainly buying booze. If so, good work!